Aladdin Ullah, a South Asian Trailblazer in New York

In the early 1990s, Bangladeshi-American comedian Aladdin Ullah found himself in a Los Angeles hotel room, anxiously preparing for the part of a mercurial Middle-Eastern prince in an upcoming blockbuster. “Death to America!” he hollered at a mirror. “Death to America! Death to America!” he continued, trying variations of the phrase before acknowledging that it didn’t really matter—such were the one-dimensional roles regularly thrust upon South Asian actors trying to make it in Hollywood.

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Aladdin Ullah launched his one-man show in New York, skillfully weaving humor into the story of his immigrant family’s pursuit of the American Dream.

“That was the last straw for me,” said Mr. Ullah, 38, who expressed his disgust to the film’s director. “Most our fathers are not kings, they’re just dishwashers,” he told his boss before giving up the role, trading in the glitz and glamour of the movies for the grittier comedy scene in New York City. There he found success, becoming one of the first South Asians to appear as a stand-up comedian on U.S. television, gracing channels like MTV and Comedy Central. He was also one of the co-founders and hosts of “Color Blind,” a socio-political show featuring a multi-ethnic ensemble that countered what Mr. Ullah described as the “entrenched racism” of the mainstream comedy clubs at the time.

“The only club our show got into back in 1994 was a cross-dressing cabaret venue called ‘Don’t Tell Mama,’” Mr. Ullah said. “After about two weeks there, we were rocking the house and that’s how I got discovered.”

He went on to headline at over 100 American colleges, appeared in the hit independent film “American Desi” (2001) as a bumbling, fresh-off-the-boat professor, and eventually became a member of a writers’ group backed by one of New York’s top performance venues, The Public Theater. Amidst all this, he began penning the first pages of “Indio,” an energetic, one-man show that skillfully braids immigration, family, art and the hallowed American dream, resulting in a humorous—and sometimes, poignant—reflection of Mr. Ullah’s life.

Debuting Indio at Joe’s Pub last week, Mr. Ullah elicited multiple laughs from the 150-person audience as he recounted being raised as a Bengali Muslim in the Big Apple’s rough-and-tumble Spanish Harlem neighborhood. As a teenager, he remembers campaigning ardently for a pair of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar sneakers, named after the legendary basketball player. Mr. Ullah’s pious mother eventually acquiesced once he pointed out the star athlete shared her faith. He light-heartedly reiterated his father’s description of his early days in America. “When I first flushed a toilet, son…it was beautiful!” he exclaimed in heavily-accented English. “We were like a masala fruit bowl on the subway,” he deadpanned, recalling his parents donning their Sunday best (a traffic-stopping yellow sari and a regal, blue kurta) as the family embarked on weekend excursions to Manhattan’s only Indian theater. But his voice softened as he looked back on watching the Satyajit Ray classic, “Pather Panchali” for the very first time. “That day, there were no foreigners in the theater,” he said. “Just Bengali men who knew that story a little too well.”

Mr. Ullah’s late father, who arrived in New York in the early 1940s, represented a “naïve but noble,” cluster of immigrants, said the comedian. “These were just men with just causes,” he told India Real Time. “Today, desis like Raj Rajaratnam and Rajat Gupta want the hustle,” he added, referring to the two key players charged in Wall Street’s insider trading scandal du jour. “They’ve just assimilated and fallen into this win-at-all-cost, capitalistic ideal. I’m not hopeful of South Asians in positions of power, though I have faith in our youth.”

It’s this glimmer of hope that fuels his writing, which he claims, will always shine a spotlight on the often overlooked South Asians who arrived in America decades before the ground-breaking Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.

“There would be no act if it wasn’t for these immigrants,” Mr. Ullah said.

His other works include “Halal Brothers,” a play based on his father’s experiences while employed at Amir’s, a restaurant in Harlem. According to Mr. Ullah, the spot was a casual hangout for members of The Nation of Islam, a religious movement committed to enhancing the lives of African-Americans in the U.S. and abroad.

“The Bengalis who worked at Amir’s—not intellectuals, but laborers—had a huge influence over the rhetoric of this organization but history doesn’t show that at all,” he revealed. “These are the stories Hollywood won’t tell,” he added. “They want our labor but not our humanity.”